BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — As Buffalo Public Schools prepare for a new year ahead, leaders are also prepping for a new transportation plan for the 10,000 students in the City of Buffalo who rely on the NFTA.
"This is the kind of path forward," NFTA Police Chief Brian Patterson said.
Patterson said his school resource unit reported there is a large amount of time when students are waiting for the bus before they get home from school. In the past, students would have a four-hour window from the time they got out of school to the time they got home, but this year it'll be a two-hour window.
"And in a four-hour window you can imagine is quite generous and so we said let's take a look at that time can we reduce that in a way that makes sense and we've done so," Patterson said.
Patterson said the majority of students behave while using the NFTA buses or metro rail, but fighting is a top concern for leaders as they head into a new school year.
"There's a small percentage [of students] that are gaming the system using the time to use the system to misbehave anywhere from all kind of behavior that you imagine that can go on but one of biggest fears is the fighting," Patterson explained.
Students will have these NFTA bus passes only allowing them to use one to two routes to get to and from home for free, but some parents and advocates aren't on board with this, including Jessica Bauer Walker, a BPS parent and president for community health worker parent association for BPS.
"I'm just concerned for my own children and for other students that it might put them in a situation where they can't get transportation in a way that they need to to be safe," Bauer Walker said.
She said this change came as a surprise.
"We thought that things were moving in the direction to completely release those restrictions. Now, we're hearing Buffalo Schools has concerns around safety and now there's another layer of restrictions going on," she added, "We believe for the high schoolers there should not be any restrictions on those bus passes because the student lives are pretty complex whether its sporting events working after school having to go take care of family members."
Keith Jones, the head of the transportation committee on the Buffalo Parent Teacher Organization said there are a lot of aspects that the district didn't take into consideration.
"They didn't take the family structure into consideration because you have a lot of two-family homes," Jones said, "See you're saying you're trying to eliminate a problem but you creating another one and that don't work."
7 News reached out to BPS for an interview about this. A spokesperson sent back this statement:
“The Buffalo Public Schools is committed to student safety. For that reason, we have worked with the NFTA leadership to ensure parents know where their children are and that they get home in a safe and timely fashion from school. Any additional transportation required by students for after-school activities will be accommodated. Students who participate in school-sponsored athletics, activities, or documented employment that require travel later than two hours after a school’s dismissal time, school staff will affix a sticker to the pass and an updated code will be uploaded to the NFTA. The sticker will act as a visual that will indicate their valid hours of travel and the uploaded code will ensure access to the NFTA rail and buses for their new expanded hours of travel.”
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